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O papel dos manuais didáticos e das mídias educativasthinking skills (SOUZA, 1999d). Activities may standardize the student, asking for trivial andpredictable responses which require no reflection, denying the individuality of each student, or, on thecontrary, may require its actual participation, leading them to reflect upon questions which don'tdemand automatic, thoughtless answers.An important fact regarding coursebooks, especially the ones for foreign language teaching, istheir origin. Books produced internationally in countries where English is the mother tongue, andaimed at the global market, could fail to incorporate the sociocultural realities of the learners, becausethese books do not have a specific target audience. However, such books are, in general, moreaccepted in the market, because they are written by native speakers of the language, who, supposedly,have greater authority and legitimacy in talking about their native language than a non-native speaker.Therefore, publishers are interested in investing in this type of material, aimed at the global market: itswide acceptance ensures sales and reduces costs, since it is possible to produce the same title toencompass different markets in different countries. The coursebook has, therefore, an ideologicalcharacter, because it is the product of a cultural industry (FREITAG et al., 1997).This character of a cultural industry product is also responsible for a certain standardization ofcoursebooks. "The differences between a book and another, a publisher and another, an author andothers, are minimal" (FREITAG et al., 1997, p. 62). A successful coursebook is often taken as amodel, and other authors and publishers get inspiration from it to write and produce new titles. Theresult of this policy is that there is little variation among coursebooks of a same methodological line(CORACINI, 1999a; OLIVEIRA et al., 1984). In the search for better sales 131 , the differences betweencoursebooks are leveled through time, with the ones which achieve successful sales being “copied” –what makes coursebooks become characterized by homogeneity, mediocrity and routine" (FREITAGet al., 1997, p. 62), with the repetition of the same themes and activities in various books of differentauthors and publishers. This pattern must feature an ideological control, in which several coursebooksspread the same ideologies: often linked to ideologies of capitalism. This way, coursebooks contributeto the trivialization and unidimensionalization of themes, problems and world conflicts.This ideological character of coursebooks is often revealed in the non-naturalization of topicsdiscussed and texts selected, which might marginalize students in establishing a distance in relation tothe problems of their everyday realities (FREITAG et al., 1997). Coursebooks can be "importantconformers of biases, ideologies and social apprehension modes" (OLIVEIRA et al., 1984, p. 16). Lifeis full of conflicts; coursebooks usually show no conflicts. This alienated position must turncoursebooks into a "pedagogical Disneyland" (FREITAG et al., 1997), a fantasy world whereeverything (and everyone) is perfect and nothing ever goes wrong.However, in the current post-modern sociohistorical context, characterized by fragmented andmultimodal discourses, in which images overlap words, with a reduction of words in favor of images,the postmodern coursebook becomes a true "iconographic delirium" (FREITAG et al., 1997), openingto the teacher and students quite rich possibilities of exploring multiliteracies (COPE & KALANTZIS,2000). Under this perspective, knowledge of a language is understood as literacy capacities in the useof the language, being the literacy capacities defined as cultural modes of constructing meanings:seeing, describing, explaining, understanding and thinking (COPE & KALANTZIS, 2000).Among these literacies, one can highlight: language literacy, visual literacy, sound literacy,non-verbal literacy, digital literacy, multimodal literacy, multicultural literacy, and critical literacy.Such literacies are not isolated and with clear borders, but they bypass each other in discourse. Thecoursebook, which can be characterized as a hypergenre (as pointed out before), should be a privilegedspace for the agglutination of various literacy practices, materialized in a variety of discourse genres.All these literacy practices are loaded with ideology – the selection of what to include andwhat to exclude from the coursebook already features an ideological choice. This ideological burden,however, is not necessarily something negative. Since the sign is always ideological (BAKHTIN([1929] 2002), so is the coursebook – after all, what is a coursebook other than a set of signs and131 Besides the commercial aspect of sales, in which the business logic of profit prevails, other aspects of marketing are alsoinvolved in producing a textbook. Emphasis should be given not only to the cost of production, distribution, promotion andmarketing, but also to issues involving schedule and graphic design (including costs of typography, iconography, graphicalproject, copyright etc. (OLIVEIRA et al., 1984). Once more, the publisher’s will to publish what is economically moreattractive could overlap the author’s will to publish something pedagogically more consistent.465